Usage

Use of XMind Sync for Outlook

See how our product supports your GTD, life management and mind maps.

Getting Things Done

Our product is specifically targeted to adopters of David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology. In course of implementing it you may have found out that your Someday/Maybe list, or Project lists are growing very large and it is harder and harder to grasp them. The solution to this problem is introducing a graphical hierarchy to the tasks in the form of mind maps. The graphical representation of your all life activities and ability to dynamically change viewing distance and scope gives a real boost to the GTD and its plain lists. In the same time, you still can manage context task lists conventionally in Outlook, as they are seamlessly kept in sync. Moreover, you can still synchronize your task lists to your PDA via ActiveSync and any other application that integrates with Outlook (like Mylyn).

XMind Sync has also a feature that will allow to group outlook tasks by their hierarchical location in mind maps. You can mark certain mind map topics as "projects" and subtopics will receive a category consisting of tilda sign (~) and the project name. Now you can view a list of tasks in the project by opening Outlook and filtering or grouping by that category. This will work in your PDA, too.

XMindlook integrates two powerful concepts of GTD and mind mapping to deliver robust, and transparent trusted system for all of information you need to store and process.

For mind-mappers

Our tool is simple add-on to free XMind mind-mapping software allowing to export selected items to MS Outlook and also import tasks from Outlook to XMind.

Each exported/imported topic has a start and due date, progress percentage, priority and categories. They will be automatically kept in sync - any changes in one application will be immediately reflected in the other. XMindlook introduces the concept of categories to XMind. It allows to assign each topic a set of categories (like "family", "work" etc.), that in turn are synchronized with Outlook categories.

You can use XMind Sync to create various reports from information stored in your mind maps. For example, you can list all topics that are due in this week, all topics grouped by category, all tasks that have progress lower than 30%. All this can be accomplished using robust MS Outlook user interface and task engine.

Integration with Outlook also means that all of your important tasks stored in mind maps may be synchronized to your mobile device. There are also numerous plugins to Outlook allowing to sync to other devices (Android, Symbian, iPhone... ) and applications (Toodledo, Salesforce, Mylyn... ). Using Outlook, you can even synchronize your tasks within teams of people.

Life management

One of the goals we had in mind when designing XMind Sync was to create a tool that would make it easier to manage daily life complexity. On the presentation below we will explain the principles of our methodology, which is an extension to the popular Getting Things Done method by David Allen.

The idea is to have your tasks, projects and thoughts stored in a trusted place, so that you can stop thinking about remembering about them and start doing them. Those items will be placed in mind maps, structured by your life goals or values (like „happy family” or „big career”), projects (like „great trip to Europe” or „write PhD”) and tasks („list interesting cities” or „write thesis introduction”). Having that nicely ordered in mind maps will allow you to grasp most of your life complexity with one glance and remain properly motivated in executing the tasks.

At the same time, you can mark tasks in your mind map that are to be executed during this week or on specific day. Our application will transfer this information to Outlook so that you can view as a current and future tasks list, grouped by context (like „at computer” , „at home”, „errands”), priority and due date. You can use this Outlook list for deciding what to do next and other daily tasks management.